Village Christmas Read online

  I don’t write like Jeffrey Archer – on a word processor called Priscilla. I love manipulating words. It’s very rewarding when you’ve done it. But it does take so much out of you. I’m prone to scrambling of the brains, can only survive a couple of days a week. Then I have to draw the blinds to regain my strength. You can talk about broken bones and car accidents. But you can’t talk about what happens to the brain and nervous system when you’re writing at that level.

  My theory is that a strong healthy man isn’t likely to be creative. It is illness and pain that encourages him to live another life.

  I still get this recurrent pneumonia when the lungs are full of pulsating barbed wire and the temperature goes up. When that happens I hide away like an animal in the long grass or bushes. The only cure is to lie still and wait for it to pass. Sometimes it takes a couple of days, sometimes two weeks. But it does make you turn your attention to the reality of having to leave this world one day and if I ask myself if I’m reconciled, the answer is I’m not.

  Now I’ve got a split iris, can’t read as easily as I could. But I can still see landscapes and girls’ legs.

  The Fight to Save Slad

  When I gaze across Slad Valley from my cottage window, I can see – despite my fading sight – fields and hedgerows that were planted a thousand years ago. Beyond my garden is a honey-coloured Cotswold-stone farmhouse with the date 1521 carved in the wall in old-fashioned script. To the right is a sixteenth-century house with perfect Elizabethan windows.

  There’s a field halfway up the slope and when the sun is sinking in autumn it throws a special slant and shadow and reveals the foundations of an ancient manor house and the line of the old vanished road running down to the stream.

  There’s also Swift’s Hill, crouching like an almost pagan presence, protecting the valley. In fact, one of my ancestors was buried there three thousand years ago. At least, when archaeologists dug him up I claimed him as an ancestor because a dentist friend who examined him told me his teeth were just like mine.

  I had hoped that this beloved landscape of hollows and silence and bullying autumn winds, the inspiration for my book Cider with Rosie, might long outlast me. Yet this week I had to drag myself from my sickbed to add my rather quavery voice to those of my campaigning neighbours. We want to stop a new housing estate being built in our valley.

  This irreplaceable patch of English countryside is often referred to as the ‘Cider with Rosie Valley’ or ‘Laurie Lee’s Valley’ because I had the great good fortune to be born and raised here, and because I ‘immortalized’ it, as media types say, in my book about Slad life at the start of this century.

  But it is not ‘my’ valley. It belongs to everyone who loves unspoiled green landscapes and to all those not yet born, and in a way is a symbol of much of what is happening to Britain.

  And so I stood up at the meeting of local people, wrapped in a blanket and trying to stifle a hacking cough, and pointed out to the gathered property speculators that Slad Valley is a pure, refreshing artery which pours crystal air and unpolluted nourishment into Stroud, and that if we allow their so-called development to go ahead we shall see our rural landscape scarred forever and will be guilty of a self-inflicted wound that not even time will heal.

  Everyone clapped and nodded their heads apart from a youngish Maggie Thatcher lookalike who was surrounded by piles of statistics. She was there representing the developers and, in a musical but threatening voice, she gave us protesters a severe dressing down.

  She seemed to be saying, if I interpreted her words correctly, that the proposed development of ninety houses, roads, roundabouts, car parks and so forth had been approved at government level and there was nothing that ordinary people could do about it. My neighbour muttered that there was nothing we could do either when developers closed down our bus station.

  On that occasion we’d been suddenly ‘privatized’ and a comfortable place where people could sit, gossip and buy cups of tea had been demolished. Where we’d once had four buses a day dropping off the old-timers when they tapped the driver on the shoulder, we now have about two buses a week, and people are jostled about in the rain and tumble into the gutter in the stampede to clamber aboard. There are no buses at all to some villages.

  I told the chairwoman that the word ‘development’ is just a euphemism for ravagement and exploitation, and that the so-called developers are not building a housing estate for the fun of it but to screw as much profit out of it as they can. Everyone clapped again and stamped their feet in agreement.

  The meeting hall was full, not just with troublesome old narks like me, but with young mothers, teenagers, fathers, lovely old ladies being guided into their seats by the elbow – all of us respectable, decent citizens wishing to preserve our landscape of tangled woods and sprawling fields, of steep, grassy slopes that are a funnel for winter winds and a bird-crammed, insect-hopping suntrap in summer.

  When the statistics lady repeated that the Government’s decision was final, I called out ‘Never trust the Government. Look what they did to the coal mines’, and in doing so I no doubt spoiled forever my chances of a knighthood … but I am extremely angry.

  This valley has remained untouched since Roman times, and a housing estate will mean the end of a pastoral paradise that generations have loved and grown up in. Repeated in other valleys all over the country, it would destroy our landscape.

  I must emphasize that I am not against people having the right to a decent home, but I do think estates should fit in with the existing environment. We can’t understand why the developers don’t move into the centre of Stroud – a town which is very dear to me – much of which has sadly become corroded and empty, with boarded-up shops and smashed windows, and redevelop what is already there.

  Further up the valley is Bulls Cross, a saddle of heathland where relics of the old stagecoach roads are still imprinted in the grass, and below that is a dank yellow wood known locally as Deadcombe Bottom.

  Here it was, years ago, that my brothers and I discovered a cottage with roof fallen in and garden run wild. We played there often among its rotten rooms and gorged ourselves on the sharp apples which hung round the shattered windows. We could do what we liked there and it was only later that we learned it had been the home of the Bulls Cross hangman and that he had hanged himself there on a hook in the hall which we liked swinging from.

  As a child I thought the whole world was like Slad Valley. Until I was eighteen I’d never travelled more than two miles. I thought Tewkesbury was in Poland.

  This week the valley I love is loud and alive with spring birdsong, but the moment the bulldozers move in the birds will shut up and the soul will fly out of Slad. Housing development will gradually encroach upon the fields, woods, lanes and quarries which were an open-air playground for me and generations of children, and a setting for unforgettable adventures and encounters with badgers, rabbits, birds’ nests, glow-worms.

  It was in these meadows where I first breathed the first faint musks of sex and where Rosie Burdock shared her cider with me during haymaking, on a motionless day of summer, hazy and amber-coloured, with the beech trees standing in heavy sunlight as though clogged with wild, wet honey – a day when the hay-wagon under which we lay went floating away like a barge out over the valley.

  A new housing estate built here will simply open the floodgates; development will creep up the valley, blotting out fields where youngsters now prowl and run at liberty. Children trapped in new concrete estates will be denied the freedom we knew. They’ll become prisoners of television, as most children are today, and as they grow up they’ll start hanging about the streets in gangs and stealing cars.

  When I left Slad to walk to Spain, and subsequently travelled to forty different countries, I realized that nothing could equal this valley for loveliness. I also knew that I would have to come back.

  When I took Cathy, my child bride as I like to call her, to Spain in 1950, I pined for Slad. We were then so poor tha
t we lived on plain spaghetti and chopped up the furniture for firewood.

  For twelve years we were disappointed at not having a child. Then, when I made enough money from my first book, A Rose for Winter, we returned to Slad. A year later our daughter Jessy was born and I truly believe that we had to come back home in order to get her.

  Slad is where I belong. A few years ago, when I was in America for Christmas, a friend gave me a painting he had done of the Slad Valley. My eyes immediately filmed over and I wanted to drop everything and leg it back home.

  So what can we ordinary people do to save our countryside for future generations? Well, six years ago, when developers were planning to chop down twelve ancient trees to make way for a new Tesco supermarket in Stroud, a lot of people protested by climbing up into the trees, and I wrote a little joke verse that went:

  ‘I think that I shall never see

  A Tesco lovely as a tree

  And if we are forced to cut ours down

  ’Twill shame the gateway to our town.’

  It wasn’t one of my best but the trees were saved, and I like to believe that passionate public opinion can influence the most stony-hearted ministers.

  Of course, I am now an old man, but this fight to save Slad is a very serious matter. I’d like to know that those who come after me can sit on the hill overlooking the valley and know exactly where the sun and moon will rise, and from behind which tree, while the year goes through its changing phases as it has done down all the centuries.

  SPRING

  * * *

  The English Spring

  Almost every place in the world knows some measure of spring – a moment’s thaw, a brief changing of gears, perhaps a pause in the furnace of some desert wind, a burst of rock-flowers, a revving-up of the blood.

  But spring comes to England as to no other country, as though this island were its natural home, as though this small green platform on the edge of the Atlantic was the original spawning ground of the season. Indeed you might almost imagine, to judge from much of our folklore and poetry, that Spring and England had invented each other.

  For one thing it seems to last longer here, lingering voluptuously over the passive landscape, like the trembling wing of some drowsy bird stretched in a trance and loath to leave it. The Mediterranean spring can be brash and violent, an explosion of growth that withers in a week. But spring in England is like a prolonged adolescence, stumbling, sweet and slow, a thing of infinitesimal shades, false starts, expectations, deferred hopes, and final showers of glory.

  The first intimations come as early as January, several months ahead of their time, when a sudden breath of warm air can release a quick prelude of birdsong, valiant but half-deceived – the throbbing cry of a blackbird like a rising arrow, or the low fat call of a dove. Perhaps the sky very briefly turns from grey to rose, clouds break to a southern light, and the soft changes in the air make one pause in the street, unclench one’s fists, look up, remember.

  But these signs are the outriders, the single spies, scouting ahead of the big battalions. Winter hardens again and settles back on the world. There are dark weeks to be lived through yet. But the promise has been made, and the blackbird repeats it, in brief snatches, in the teeth of the cold.

  February is zero, twenty-eight days of waiting, a month of silence and frozen growth, when all the germs of spring stand on the brink of stillness, life loaded but as yet unfired. The tight buds of the trees hang like polished bullets ready-poised for the sun’s first spark. Roots are buried fuses, set for the detonations of petals; fields stand stripped for the first green flame. It is a month when all life huddles in a carapace of ice, in a shell of necessary impatience.

  Then almost overnight comes gusty March and the first real rousing of spring – a time of blustering alarms and nudging elbows, of frantic and scrambling awakenings. It is a bare world still, but a world of preparation and display against the naked face of the countryside. The cold east wind puts an edge to activity. Hares dance in the shivering grasses. Rooks load their loud nests on the bending treetops and the wild duck mates in the reeds.

  There is a fierce drive now in the antics of the earth, a hint of fire in the moving air. Giant combs stir the woods, shaking out catkin and pussy willow – the golden first flowers of the trees – and the birds no longer hop singly about, or brood mutely under the bushes, but suddenly take wing and chase each other, clamouring with new intentions.

  March is the time of spring’s first hot certainties, melting the winter’s sleep around us, when the dawn songs of these birds, robin, blackbird and thrush, are like drops of warm oil in the dark, liquid sounds that pour softly upon our deadened senses, healing us back to life. The early flowers, too, just appearing in the woods, pointed periwinkle, anemone, violet, are sharp tiny stars on the cold black ground, sudden cracks in the earth’s big freeze.

  The earth tilts, the graph rises, the first profits are gathered, bolder statements are made in the air. There is an extension of light at both ends of the day, more health in the face of the sun. Buds are swelling, cows fattening, farmers ploughing their fields, cottagers turning the clods in their gardens; cocks crow, hens lay, the pond is cloudy with frogspawn – you know at last things are going to be all right.

  March is the wild time, the preliminary attack, the great lion that claws at the roots – then shading away into April, all fury spent, its shaggy head laid between its paws.

  And April, indeed, is the lamb of spring, the Paschal Lamb of resurrection, which walks through the burgeoning English landscape in the pure coat of its Easter wool. White is the colour now, with honeyed pyramids in the orchards and drifts of thorn-flowers like snow in the hedges, where the first slow bees, still aching with cold, come fumbling to unlock the petals.

  T. S. Eliot called April ‘the cruellest month’, and it is the month of spring’s sweetest pain – the pain of awakening and having to live once more after the anaesthetic of winter, the agony of sap returning to the limbs, of numb hands held to the fire. It is also the pain of Lazarus called back from the tomb, the sudden end to sleep and forgetting, the pain of groping shoots and uncurling emotions, of being shaken again with love.

  But this is also the splendour of English April, its blinding shock and light, with everything suddenly fresh-peeled and shining with the vaporous brilliance of the newly born. The enlarged blue skies pulse with showers and sunshine, clouds are lively as kicking babes, while the tender new radiance washes down from the heavens purging the world of the wastes of winter.

  Between the showers of April even the sunlight is wet, a moist gold like transparent honey, mistily dripping across the hills and valleys and filtering into the damp warm depths of the woods. The fatty gold of this sun seems to cover the ground so that all the flowers become pieces of it, the yellow crocus and celandine, the first marigold in the marsh, the butterpat primrose and daffodil. Later the mysterious bluebells collect in pools, deep and still in the forest shadows, fringed by opening ferns and the bitter ivy, blank as the eyes of witches.

  April’s resurrection is the holiest of times, the dressing of the goddess of earth, as the sharp new green powders the edge of the woods and the first skylark runs his song up the sky. All the birds are nesting, crouching on jewelled little eggs and packing the bushes with feathers; the swallow returns, swooping from Africa; the cuckoo gives his first warm shout of the year; windows are thrown open, new hats bloom on housewives, and lovers at last are reacquainted with grass.

  English April is also the sign of the first spring festivals, as old as man’s life on earth, with the worship of the green, the celebration of birth, of salvation and the open air. Lent was a period of fasting, almost of fear, a placating of the hidden sun; but with the arrival of Easter, man comes out of his shelter, looks about him, and doubts no more.

  All the pagan anxieties that still sit in our bones, locked there through the English winter, by shackles of cold and by lack of light, are assuaged on this happy morning. Curious
rites and demonstrations, vestigial and confused, filtering down from who knows what distant shores – from Palestine, Rome, Ancient Greece or Egypt – still survive or are remembered here.

  The townsman, though shorn from his ancient roots, still feels the thrust of spring through the pavements, grows restless, smartens up, repaints the front of his house, plants some seeds in his window box, or joins his neighbours in the streets for the first ritual washing of cars before the first drive to the crowded sea. In the country, of course, the memory is stronger, with nature a more overwhelming presence, where the spring gods of our forefathers, though now grown dim, still haunt us with primeval dreams.

  I was born and brought up in the west country of Gloucestershire, a place of steep hills and secret valleys, and the spring customs I’ve heard about, or took part in as a child, were once common throughout the whole of England. At Easter, there was the usual giving of eggs, ancient emblems of life and fertility, the customary glut of white weddings, the bleaching of choirboy’s robes, the decorating of the church in the first of the green. There are still, even now, the rituals centred on water – the blessing of wells by flower-decked children; and the annual outing to the Severn to see the big spring tide, awesome symbol of regeneration, which coincides with the moon and comes roaring upriver with the mighty thrust of a god.

  But I can remember, or have heard the old folk describe, stranger rites that at last are dying, the local acting of myths whose mysterious origins reach back beyond recognition. Each parish, each village, each tribal family seemed to perform some special variation of its own. What they meant, where they came from, no one seemed to know; and in the old days would not have asked.

  For instance, there was that curious Easter dance performed at a village a few miles from my home, when the entire population, holding onto each other’s coattails, wound like a serpent through the narrow streets. It was called ‘Threading the Needle’, and was done every year, though nobody could remember why. What was its meaning? The drive of sap through the roots, of living blood through the veins of the village, or some old tribal wandering through the chambers of the underworld before emerging into the light of spring?